The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California is getting serious about ethics — by requiring all of its 230,000 to take an online ethics course.
Yeah, throwing coursework at the problem will solve it.*
Indeed, I’m not sure I’d even want to count this as “coursework” given the article’s description of what the employees will be getting:
The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC’s 230,000 employees on the university’s expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. …
Although the course was developed to support an ethics policy adopted by the regents in May 2005, the compensation controversy of the past year has highlighted the need for it, said UC spokesman Paul Schwartz.
The regents’ ethics policy covers everything from respect for others to compliance with university rules to encouraging employees to report workplace wrongdoing.
“I think it’s fair to say that the importance of the ethics training was highlighted by the audit findings and issues,” Schwartz said.
The online course warns employees that, “Some activities may be legal, but they may not pass the ‘smell’ test. Avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest or commitment can be a bit tricky. The easiest way to stay out of a trouble spot is to ask yourself, ‘Would I want to read about this in the newspaper or online?’ ”
However, Schwartz noted that the university has been working on ethics issues independent of the controversy. …
According to a Web site created for employees, the online briefing runs participants through interactive scenarios to give them the chance to “ponder possible ethical challenges in the workplace” and determine how the university’s values and standards apply.
The answers are multiple-choice, and in some cases there are multiple correct answers, “to get people thinking about all of the ramifications of a questionable act,” Schwartz said.
There is no real score, and answers are not monitored. “People are shown what answers they got right/wrong as they go through each scenario so they can assess their learning,” Schwartz said.
Among the scenarios employees have to navigate are nepotism in hiring, using university funds to buy employees cocktails at a reward dinner and making promises to provide extra pay to employees beyond what is allowed by policies.
The scenarios are especially relevant in light of the recent controversy, in which some top UC officials were found to have engaged in such behavior. In addition, last year [UC President Robert] Dynes admitted to regents and state legislators that there was a culture in his office of “trying to get away with as much as possible and disclose as little as possible.” Dynes, who has already completed the course, said in his video introduction that it is important for all employees to have a common frame of reference on ethics.
The scenarios sound like they might be interessting, but from the sounds of things, this online “course” could be kind of like online traffic school**, only with less accountability. There’s “no real score” and no monitoring of how people did. I hate to say it, but my experience with students tends to indicate that it’s harder for people to make themselves care about assignments that don’t “really” count.
Also, this new initiative fits right in with other scandal-driven “efforts” at addressing ethics: when people in the organization get caught doing unethical things (and the funders and/or public find out and get mad), the organization does something to say, “See, we really do care about ethics!” I’ll allow as how these organizations care about ethics to the extent that not getting caught doing unethical things will take the pressure off of them, but really caring about ethics would involve cultivating them within the organization even if no one from outside the organization was watching. That kind of cultivation probably requires more than a half-hour online tutorial, or even a weekend retreat. Real commitment to ethics means that its woven into the fabric of everything you do.
Maybe there is real ethical cultivation happening at UC. I hope so, because it’s a bigger project than this online briefing will be able to accomplish by itself.
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*Of course, I teach an ethics in science course that might not even exist if various scientific misconduct scandals hadn’t prompted the NIH to require ethics coursework for students supported by NIH training grants. I don’t want to deny that coursework can be helpful. But ethical cultivation isn’t a project you can finish in a semester. It takes a village to raise ethical scientists.
**For those in states that may not have this: “traffic school” is an option people ticketed for speeding and such can exercise to avoid accruing points on their licenses. They show you the gross-out driver’s ed movies, give you state-approved information about safe operation of motor vehicles, and chew up some of your time and money in the hopes that you’ll desist from the behind-the-wheel behavior that got you the ticket. The demand for traffic school is substantial, and online traffic school is one popular option.
I doubt that these ethics courses will probably get much engagement from UC employees, even compared to the half hour they are supposed to take. My job requires online training for “safety” and other institutional goals. Mostly these feel like they have no relevance to the work I actually do and are just a hoop to jump through with the minimum possible effort. I doubt these courses have much impact on my colleagues’ behavior. Is there any empirical data on this sort of thing?
The more I see, the more convinced I am that governments are run by morons. I just took a DoD online course in computer security (estimated time one and a half hours). The presentation was cunningly crafted so that animations would take a long time, thus forcing one to pay very close attention. Of course, I surfed in the meantime. At the end there was a “random” quiz on which the passing score was 80 percent. If you fail you must take the entire course again, and you can’t get to the quiz without looking at every single thing in the course. Again. And they don’t bother to tell you what you get wrong on the quiz. The government spends you tax money to come up with this bullshit.
Maybe it will be like the one the white house staff had to take….
http://www.buffalobeast.com/88/ethics666.htm
I wish someone who cared had taught my NIH-mandated ethics course. It was every week for a semester, and was all along the lines of “Falsifying data is bad!” Really? We had no idea.
My senior year as an engineering undergrad I took a course on professional ethics. Geared toward technical minds, it used charts and diagrams to instill a sense of morality. My favorite part was the use of an x-y graph to determine if a contribution is a gift or a bribe. the x-axis represents the cost of the gift, and the y-axis represents how closely it was tied to a particular descision that you made. We were instructed to stay out of the first quadrant.
I’ve been required to take “lab safety” courses like this, which are, uniformly, jokes. In one case, a perfectly serviceable one-hour video that actually demonstrated what to do in case of a radioactive-material spill was replaced by a FOUR-hour “radiation safety” course that started out “This is a proton. This is a neutron…”, contained NO actual information on emergency procedures, and ended with a “quiz” that consisted solely of regulatory jargon copied verbatim out of the course notes, which could be kept open while we took the test.
But, hey, it kept us there for four hours, so it had to be four times as good as the video, even though the latter gave us clear information that would be very important in case one of us had a little oopsie with our P32-labeled reagents.